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36 PROCESS STUDIES SUPPLEMENTS 12 (2008) relations to other entities. Whitehead’s notion of an “enduring character” is meant to supplant the misplaced concreteness of determinations of the “essence” or the “nature” of things, or of humanity for instance. Against such essentialist tendencies, from the process-relational perspective, the enduring character of humanity is continually in flux, and without “privileged moments,” wherein any determination of it is never fixed and final, but rather open to revision, corresponding with the notion that human beings, like all other actual entities, are not static substances. However, in contrast to deconstructive postmodernism, with its massive critical attack on essentialism, from the process-relational standpoint, we can still entertain such discussions regarding the “enduring character of ‘the human’.” To a certain extent, Whitehead shares in the postmodernist criticism of language. He states that it is “hopelessly ambiguous” and inadequate to express actuality and he criticizes “the habit of thinking of words as fixed things with specific meanings . . . [because in actuality] the meanings of language are in violent fluctuation” (Dialogues 296-97). Whitehead further suggests that the abstractions of linguistic expression “lead . . . away from the realities of the immediate world” (MT 39). But, Whitehead does not take the deconstructionist turn. From the process philosophical stance, all characterizations of the enduring character of “the human” are to be interpreted as speculative approximations from within the confines of conventional language. In recognizing these limitations, philosophy may continue to express “the character of the human,” without the essentializations and/or the misplaced concretenesses which do violence to its actuality. If one insists on having “a determination of the nature of the human” from the process-relational standpoint, then it can be affirmed that, according to Whitehead, the enduring character of the human in our contemporary epoch involves recourse to the notion of creativity. Human beings are creative organisms, creativity, for Whitehead, being their “grandeur” and “dignity” (Dialogues 371). For him, human beings are finite “co-creators” in conjunction with God, Nature, and all other organisms in the natural world. In Whitehead’s cosmology, the notion of creativity is a holistic expression of the totality of organic experience, where each organism engages in its own particular creative processes and is constituted by it. Consequently, a determination of the character of “the human” from the aspect of creativity entails a focus on the human organism in
Scarfe/Overcoming Anthropocentric Humanism 37 its full complexity, including its concrete experience, its faculties, its aims and purposes, its feelings and emotions, its strengths, its weaknesses, its suffering, its finitude, its lived connections with the other actual entities which help to compose Nature, and so on— and not merely, for instance, by way of their “rational faculties.” In response to the imminent criticism that in suggesting that creativity pervades Nature, Whitehead is anthropocentrically ascribing human creativity and human qualities to other organisms, it should be pointed out that for him, “the human” has itself emerged both within and from Nature, and not vice-versa. One striking feature of Whitehead’s cosmology of organic interdependence is that in contrast to traditional Christian conceptions of God, God is neither conceived to be an asymmetrical causal force on the natural world, nor transcendentally apart from it. In Process and Reality, Whitehead provides a profound critique of the combination of both “the notion of God [interpreted] as the ‘unmoved mover’ [as] derived from Aristotle . . . [and] the notion of God as ‘eminently real’ [which] is a favorite doctrine of Christian theology,” which have been fused by Western culture into the idea of “an aboriginal, eminently real, transcendent creator, at whose fiat the world came into being, and whose imposed will it obeys” (PR 342). Unlike many traditional understandings of God’s qualities which dwell on the notion of God as a Prime Mover, or as an infinite, transcendent, or self-caused substance, an Almighty causal force from and by which the temporal world is generated and kept in motion, which have served to bifurcate God and the natural world, Whitehead’s own cosmology holds that God has a “finite or temporal side,” which is immanent in the world and not statically outside of it. For Whitehead, God is not to be conceived as a condescending Caesar, radically separated from and unaffected by the world, yet somehow directing the unfolding of all creatures. Thus, by providing an alternative conception of God which is not based in Cartesian substance ontology, and one which is far removed, as Jones writes in her introduction to Religion in the Making, from “a notion of divine immutable essence and eternal normative will” (xxxiii), Whitehead’s cosmological rubric does not lend itself to human mimicry of God, conceived as an infinite, self-caused substance, which, as has been characterized in this paper, is the underlying root of the anthropocentricism which is responsible for the environmental crisis. In this way, Whitehead’s critique of traditional understandings of the definition and the qualities of God and his own cosmological formulations regarding the character
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